Microsoft recently announced the live captions were in preview for Microsoft Teams meetings! This is a welcome addition for both accessibility and inclusion. Prior to this capability, some companies still had to rely on paying an outside source to attend meetings and provide a captioning service which does not come cheap. In testing with a group of people though, I found that not everyone saw the ability to turn captions on.
Desktop and application sharing has long been a thing in collaboration systems like OCS, Lync, Skype for Business, and Teams. However, one of the shortcomings has been that sharing a video that has audio, or audio on its own was not optimal. The video did not match up with the audio and the experience was very choppy.
In 2019, however, Microsoft released the ability to incorporate the option to share the audio from the host system via a Teams meeting or sharing session (which is now outdated info). This was a welcome change as it was frequently asked for. Share system audio was something that I frequently show people when doing training sessions. Much to my surprise though, in a recent training session I was unable to find this option. After a bit of poking around, I found that the option had been moved to an inconspicuous location without any notification (at least to my knowledge)…so is life in “the cloud”!
Never fear, it is still very easy to share system audio if you can’t find it elsewhere though! There are a couple of things you’ll need to do. Keep in mind that this will share ALL system audio…so if you get dings and whistles from new email alerts, etc those will also come through to the attendees so you may want to go into focus mode or do not disturb ahead of time.
That’s it, now you can play your video or audio clip and the attendees will hear it in near real time!
Have a Microsoft Teams quick tip that you think should be included in a future post? Comment below or connect with me on social media!
Back in July 2018, Microsoft released new functionality to Microsoft Teams that would migrate existing contacts and contact groups that you have configured in your Skype For Business client into Teams. Specifically, the release details were:
Bring your Skype for Business contacts to Teams
When your organization moves from Skype for Business to Teams, your contacts will make the move with you. To see them, once you’re in Teams, click Chat on the left, then Contacts at the top.
During a recent migration from Skype for Business on-premises to Teams, though, I encountered a user who had multiple groups and contacts but none appeared in the Teams client. The fix was quick and painless.
Continue readingIf you have rolled out Teams, or any user facing technology platform, you will agree that one of the biggest challenges has nothing to do with making the technology work. Instead, that challenge is usually getting people to adopt and use the new system.
I get it, breaking habits is hard and using email as your go to communication tool is a habit that we’ve had for many years. So what’s a person to do when you receive an email but want to reply and have a quick conversation outside of email instead?
Continue readingIt doesn’t matter if I’m in a group text with friends or family, posting on Twitter, or collaborating in Teams…using GIFs is my lifeblood! (PS. I only use the type that have a soft g…JIF is for peanut butter…don’t try to change my mind, it won’t work 😉)
Sometimes, the perfect GIF is out there but just not surfacing in your Teams searches. What’s a GIF master to do??
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